Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 119, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope your agents are well, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Pixar’s future and flight MH370 and sports gambling and YouTube Face, finally digging into Dungeon Crawler Carl after you recommended it so many times, hoping Rooster keeps being as good as its premiere, buying a MacBook Neo I definitely didn’t need, redesigning my Obsidian setup to James Bedford’s specifications, testing the Fairbuds XL headphones, and putting away all my winter clothes — only to drag them out again because it started snowing. Good times.
I also have for you a new game to add to your daily list, an enticing new Sonos speaker, a huge new book about Apple’s first half-century, a fun new way to YouTube, and much more. Let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / playing / taking on spring break this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Parseword. A new game from Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, this one is based on the concept of cryptic crosswords. The concept is substantially harder to explain than Wordle, but tickles my word game-loving brain in a similarly delightful way.
- The Sonos Play. Sonos’ first new speaker in more than a year is too expensive — $299 is just a lot for a wireless speaker — but otherwise sounds kind of ideal? Big and powerful enough to be a good living room speaker, portable enough to actually throw in a bag or carry to the backyard. And it does plain ol’ Bluetooth, too! I want one.
- Apple: The First 50 Years. David Pogue’s latest book is 600 pages of deep Apple lore, lovely photos, and a lot of new information about how the company evolved over the decades. I’ve been paying attention to Apple for a long time, and I learned a ton from this book.
- Perplexity Personal Computer. There are a bunch of apps coming out now that I would classify as “OpenClaw, but simpler and less risky.” People seem to like this one from Perplexity — it still requires a dedicated device and comes with some risks, but it’s a lot easier to get up and running.
- “Is the brand new city in California for real?” I had kind of forgotten about California Forever, the tech-led proposal to build an entirely new city outside of San Francisco! This is a great episode of the Volts podcast digging into how the city would work. I’m looking forward to part two.
- The Bigfoot emoji. The Unicode 17.0 standard is starting to roll out to devices — it’s currently in a bunch of Apple betas — and it includes a bunch of good new emoji! But I feel like we need to, right now, decide on a culturally useful reason to use the Bigfoot emoji all the time. Like, does it mean “badass”? Or “I don’t believe that’s real”? Something else? I need your ideas. We need to make this happen.
- Channel Surfer. This web app puts YouTube into an old-school grid of TV channels, so you can flip between videos like you’d scroll your hotel room TV. But you can also import your own subscriptions, which actually makes this one of the best lean-back YouTube experiences I’ve ever encountered.
- My WordPress. I almost don’t know what to make of this: You can now install a local version of WordPress that is confined to your browser, requires zero setup, and kind of just works. It’s WordPress as local operating system, I think? I’m a little confused by it, but fascinated by the rise in local-browser apps.
Over the last few months, I’ve been hearing from a lot of you that you want to see how other people are using AI. Their tools, their setups, the stuff they’re building, everything. What a good and Installer-y idea! So in this space, not every week but certainly from time to time, we’ll swap homescreen sharing for AI sharing.
First up: Brian Lovin, who works as a designer at Notion and is also a prolific developer and designer on the side. (If you checked out Shiori, the bookmarking app I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, you’re already familiar with his work.) Brian and I jumped on a call the other day to talk about his setup and how he gets it all done. Here’s a screenshot he sent me, for when he’s AI-ing from mobile:
The first thing Brian told me about was a prompt he loves, which he attributed to Notion cofounder Simon Last: “Step back and think really hard. How can we make this simpler and dumber while still achieving our goals?” He says he uses that prompt 20 times a day with AI coding agents. I kind of love it.
With the caveat that his setup is changing all the time, here are some apps Brian says he loves for AI work right now:
- Claude. He uses the Claude Code app for a lot of things, but also interacts with Claude in the Mac’s Terminal, in Cursor, in Zed, and elsewhere.
- Claude Skills. Brian convinced me that building skills is extremely worth your time, especially if you want your AI agents to do the same things over and over again. GitHub is also chockful of other people’s skills, if you want to start there.
- Monologue. (That’s the keyboard you see in the screenshot.) A voice-dictation app with a clever iOS keyboard for cross-app use, Brian says he uses Monologue a lot to just brain-dump tasks and projects and see what the system creates. “My first instinct is to add things to my to-do list,” he says, “and I’m rewiring my brain to just do the exploration first.”
- Conductor. This is the app Brian says more people should get into — a way to set up and manage a bunch of AI agents working in parallel. Will you end up overdoing this and making a bunch of unnecessary things? Yes. Brian has too. But he says learning how to multitask with AI agents is a huge win.
Right now, Brian told me, he’s spending most of his side-project time doing back-end coding with AI and front-end work himself. (He pointed out that Claude Code in particular has a very specific, purple-gradient-y style, and says it’s harder to coach the bot in the right direction than to just do the work himself.) But like so many other folks I’ve talked to, he says he’s continually surprised by how much better AI coding tools are getting. In three months, his whole setup might be different again.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“I’m finally starting to understand Android Studio. Maybe I have too many options and tools (Claude, Gemini, Manus, Firebase Studio, Android Studio, Replit, whatever else is in my inbox). But I’m getting there. Trying to create a notes/ to-do app where notes with tasks show up on my to-do side with a link to the note while taking advantage of Gemini Nano on my phone with sync to my Google Calendar and Tasks. Podcast app next.” — Omar
“My current obsession is Cosmic Princess Kaguya, which is playing in theaters all over Japan even though it’s been on Netflix for a month. Nothing beats sitting in a crowded room full of fans and watching a great film.” — Bea
“Just discovered All Creatures Great & Small. It’s about a small, rural veterinary practice in 1930s Great Britain. It’s endlessly wholesome, surprisingly moving, and unflinchingly British. I’m streaming it on PBS.” — Zac
“Been thinking about this Maggie Appleton essay, ‘Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers,’ a lot recently!” — Jacob
“I have a book rec I think you’re gonna love: The Prize. This book does a fantastic job of covering oil from start to now, and with it, lays out the economic background of oil then and now, the history of Western companies vs. national ownership and production, and why our modern society absolutely orbits around an energy-dense consumable fuel.” — Christopher
“I’m reading The Power Broker and listening to the 99% Invisible companion podcast with Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan.” — craigkocur
“Have you tried Rematch? It was released almost a year ago now, and it’s still my favourite football-related game.” — Eldar
“For the person looking for MP3 taggers for all the music they’re ripping off CDs, I would suggest: MusicBrainz Picard or (if you enjoy the command line) Beets.” — Daryl
“I can’t say enough good things about Mist as an AI health and fitness companion. It’s an AI chatbot but it’s ONLY focused on health. It’s super minimalist and clean. It has its own stats built in but it also syncs with Apple Health and other health services. It’s cheaper than a Gemini subscription and has an active and responsive developer as well!” — Justin
I don’t know if it’s just my particular YouTube algorithm, but it really seems like paper notebooks are having a moment. All the productivity nerds I follow are suddenly recommending their favorite analog systems, and sharing the ways in which writing longhand has made them feel saner and also get more done.
I love this idea, but I have two problems: My handwriting is trash, and I don’t know which notebook to buy. I assume this means I need to buy a bunch of pens and notebooks, because gear will solve these problems, right? RIGHT?! Anyway, I need recommendations. If you’ve gone analog, or have been that way all along, I’d love to hear the gear you picked. Someday, maybe, I’ll even be able to read my own writing.